Howard Thurman

A graduate of Morehouse College and Colgate-Rochester Divinity School, later Dean of the Boston University School of Theology, Howard Thurman met with Mohandas
K. Ghandi in 1935. He began a study of the New Testament that led him to resolve
to make Christianity "live for the weak as well as the strong-for all peoples whatever
their color, whatever their caste." Together with the Rev. Alfred Fisk, he founded
San Francisco's Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples to bring whites, blacks,
and Orientals into the same congregation. It was considered the first fully integrated
church in America, and is still in existence. In the early 1940s we got to know Howard
Thurman; he visited in our home, and he was much impressed by Libuse's watercolor
series. At Libuse's suggestion, he wrote a series of prose poems, or meditations, and
The Greatest Of These was his first published book in 1944. We tried at the time to
put out an edition of the meditations including the art work, but the project had to be
abandoned because of its extreme expense. Howard Thurman published sixteen more
books, including an autobiography, before his death in 1981.